My experience is that referring to things as "******ed" tends to go unpunished in other forums on this site. This might be an appropriate topic for ATF, if you think people should be infracted or temp-banned for it. It might have already been a topic there. I would not be opposed to doing the politically correct thing and explicitly banning use of "******" as a pejorative. I am amused by the term "spaz" bet, since "spaz" is considered to be a highly offensive term in the UK.

I thought there was a topic about it already as well, but apparently not. It has come up inside a few ATF threads but with no definitive resolution, and there was never an ATF thread created directly addressing use of the word.

I am fairly certain it has never been allowed to remain as a direct personal attack.

It always amazes me how worked up some people get over what are ultimately trivial things.

FYI Rapini got 3 days off which started yesterday morning. That's the max end of the range any ordinary poster would've been given. We want to show that mods are not above the rules.

And speaking of rules, going forward regarding this thread...

No personal attacks. They'll be dealt with harshly. And save the snarky comments, they're unproductive. Conduct yourselves in a civil manner. As browser would say, just be nice.

I submit that moderators should be held to a higher standard than regular posters.

I believe that moderators hold two jobs - one is to enforce the rules, but the other is much more significant - promoting the community.

In such a large forum as this, I recognize that the community doesn't necessarily need a lot of help, but it is still moderators who are the front line for setting the tone of an online community, and while I recognize that there are areas in this forum that are free-for-all zones, B&M isn't one of them, so the moderators should be, in my opinion, committed to upholding a higher standard on personal conduct than the ordinary poster, much like the dealer and floor person is expected to stay above the level of some of the poker players we all know and loathe.

Well that's why he was automatically given the max.

IMO if you force mods to ACT superior then they will soon believe that they are better than the lot.

I don't see being paid as making a difference at all.

Now I don't usually bring this up, but I'm speaking from something over 30 years of administering electronic message boards of some kind or another, dating back to before ARPANET was decommissioned, and around the time of FidoNet's infancy. My most notable participation was as the original founder/owner of Pilots of America, which has something close to 20,000 registered users now.

In any well run board I've been involved with, rule #1 is the moderators live by the same standards and set the example. The fact that they are volunteers is, or should be, a sign of their personal devotion to the site and the community. The best moderators have a sense of fun, and can keep the forum light, but know when to step in and when to let things run their course. The worst moderators do it out of ego and a desire to control all the discussions.

Personally I prefer that moderators report to the rest of the staff (privately, out of view of the general community) on trouble threads and have a consensus upon how to act before they actually take any punitive action (other than maybe locking a thread while it's under review) but on a site this big, maybe that's not practicable - or maybe they generally do that and we just don't see it.

In any case, I'm glad to see that the powers that be did take action on this, even if the response time was a bit dragged out.

I didn't say superior, I said hold to a higher standard.

They're not the same thing.

I'm no Rapini hater, but the 2+2 staff response was appropriate. The community looks to forum staff for behavioral clues. As this is considered a relatively newbie-drawing forum, that's even more important in LCP.

Points earned for albie for his take on it, though.

And the difference is?

Acting superior means acting like you're better than others, like you're of some higher class individual, and that any crossing of you personally is unforgivable and must be punished with extreme measures.

Being held to a higher standard means you are expected not only to abide by the rules of conduct, not just not crossing the line, but to never even come close to the line.

Being held to a higher standard means that when others come close to the line and it's directed at you personally, you ignore it, you continue to be civil and respectful, even when others spew hate and filth in your face, and only the most egregious line crossing when it comes to you personally gets a reaction.

It means that when you ARE in a dispute with someone else, you don't ever also act as judge jury and executioner.

It also means that when someone crosses the line and you're NOT the target, you step in swiftly but in a manner which diffuses if possible, taking the least possible action to control the situation.

Does that help define it for you?

Where exactly do they get paid? Mostly nowhere - being a moderator is a status thing where they are considered higher than the normal member and with that status comes greater expectations to up hold the rules and responsibilities to manage and enforce them.

Alright that's an interesting distinction. I still think one would lead to the other.

Is Rapini uncompensated by 2p2?

Correct. The mods are all unpaid volunteers. I think when the very first mod quit, he said something like "you can't pay me to put up with this ****" and so the powers that be made it a policy. But I could be wrong about that part.

Probably close to that based on the boards I have modded.

I'm going to tell you a secret that I shouldn't, because the guild of forum administrators would ddos my sites if they knew...

... but the above story is true, but it wasn't on THIS site. It was 27 years ago, on one of the first and most famous online bulletin boards of it's day - the Pirates Cove (the original) - a true den of iniquity populated by hackers and phreakers of all skill levels, home of the first real warez inventory.


And like all bulletin boards in that time, they had messages, and one of the volunteers, a hacker of no small renown (I won't say his name, he is said to continue to have systems still operating even though he died 15 years ago), got fed up with some new script kiddie bickering with him over a technical detail related to tone matching on a 2400 baud modem. He posted "you don't pay me enough to put up with this ****" and left.

After that, the guild of forum administrators formed a pact - that instead of using the most respected and talented people to run their sites, they'd pick second rate members - and even better, have them volunteer - so that the people in charge were always never quite as good as the members, but were in a position of power that they'd cling to desperately as compensation for knowing they were second best.

To this day, no administrator pays moderators, and those that do (non guild members who refuse to join) have their sites hacked or undermined and the membership leeched away to the guild sites.

This creates a natural conflict because the truly skilled end up bickering with the mods regularly, and they are so distracted by this constant fighting that they never noticed that the admins are raking in ad revenue or membership fees and they're getting none of it.

So that's why every forum you visit will always appear to be filed with ego centric mods, arrogant posters, and quiet admins who are third rate in their field, but making all the money.

I have no problem with the moderation here right now. Only got a kind post from RAPINI when posting in a spam thread. Next thing i did was reporting a spam!

Why was important intelligence about what players can try to do deleted from the CAZ thread this morning?

They can try to play within the rules

They can try to circumvent the rules

They can try to outright break the rules

Without know what sort of "intelligence" you are talking about, it is kind of hard to discuss the merits of the use of the LCP Eraser Tool and Bottle Opener.

I didn't do any of the deletions, but by looking through them there were three different sets of posts deleted:

1- A fairly LC post which talked about being able to identify a player referred to in an earlier post

2- A set of posts asking about the best way to go north, then other LC posts responding to (and generally mocking) that request

3- A set of posts giving identifying info about other former players and some LC responses

I didn't see anything which I would consider "important intelligence". I might not have deleted all of them myself, but they are all either fairly LC or violate forum rules.

Intelligence in knowing ahead of time that a visitor wants to go north in a 3/5 game? Whoever did delete it must not want forum readers to know what to watch out for.

I just read it. The guy was basically asking how he can break the rules. We're not gonna let him get answers to that.